Wild explores the theme of the jungle hero, but from a different perspective than you might be used to.

The jungle still holds secrets. Some of them are dangerous, even deadly. Some of them defy our modern understanding. Some of them, like the pale, ghostly girl who runs through the trees, can save your life.

Science City demands a very special kind of police force. A police force that knows the cutting edge, can cope with the strange and with the heroism and judgement to mete out ethical justice in an ever changing environment.

A vigilante, a ‘working class Batman’, aims to bring Justice to the streets in the 1970s. A pulp style story of corruption, violence and murder. How high does the corruption go and what can one man with a gasmask and a tool-belt do about it?

I don’t know about anyone else but I have absolutely zero confidence in my own ability as a writer or creator. Editors? You pay them, so they can’t really be trusted to be honest. They’ll just do their best to polish a turd (alright, not you Salome, don’t get your knickers in a twist).

The friends and family you show your work to? They can’t be trusted to give you their honest opinion either, because they care about you.

Once your work is out on the internet, it’s another matter. Most of the people who are going to express an opinion are going to be those who don’t like whatever it is that you’ve done. That’s just human nature, but it can further destroy what little confidence you ave in whatever deformed collection of Frankenstein paragraphs you’ve sent stumbling out into the wild to be read.

With all this hanging over you and with no real idea of how good what you’ve written is, you’re somehow expected to SELL it to people? What in the name of Klono’s beard and whiskers can you say about your own bloody writing without sounding like a conceited bell-end?

Equally, being unenthusiastic and modest about what you’ve done isn’t going to sell it to anyone. If your work is going to get anywhere on its own merits you need to reach a critical mass of people first and to do that you need to sell.

Spamming social media is OK for a bit, but then you’re breaching netiquette. Nobody looks at banner ads. Reviews mostly help people decide whether or not to buy something they’ve already decided they might be interested in.

Anyone and everyone can write and produce a book now and apparently in the minds of some this means that the pillars of heaven are shaking and hell is coming to Frogtown. I beg to differ.

It is cock-explodingly awesome that anyone who loves words can slap together something in Word, pay a mate a fiver for a stick figure drawing and throw their work up on to the Internet for anyone to download, read and enjoy. This is a good thing. It is revolutionary. It is amazing. It means that the barrier to being able to get something published is not, necessarily, being moneyed but having a reasonable amount of savvy for pecking at a keyboard with your fingers.

Of course, a lot of this stuff that comes spewing forth from the minds of The Infinite Monkeys is shite. Sturgeon’s Law still applies (90% of anything is crap) but this has always been the case. For every Charles Dickens there’s a Thomas Prest, for every Charlotte Bronte a Joanna Trollope, for every Robert E Howard a Jim Theis.

The difference now is that we need to rely on our own discernment and that of our friends. The great guardians at the gates of publishing are in the process of being rendered irrelevant. Bookshops are vanishing at a rate of knots as online ordering continues its rampage.

If we’re going to find good books, good stories, then we need to find reliable people who know what they’re talking about. To become our own ‘gateway guardians’. Writers groups, review blogs, a stamp or mark of quality from writers who back each other up and share audiences. Consumers and producers need to look out for each other and need to make a conscious effort to rave about it when we find something cool, rather than just whining and complaining and spewing comedy invective when we find something we don’t like.

I’ve been writing RPG material since ’99, and full time since 2004/2005. It takes time to make a reputation (and it’s not always the one you want) but I have to believe that genuinely trying your best and turning out quality will eventually bring you an audience, appreciation and exposure. The writing business is just broader and more dilute.

Agree or disagree?

How can we turn people on to quality?

How can we create a marque that people can trust without the traditional model?